Two years ago today, after a series of free votes in the House of Commons, the Hunting Act became law. Its aim was to bring to an end the apparent suffering which mammals experienced while being hunted by dogs.

Can I therefore be the only person in Britain who is now more anguished at the way these animals are being killed today than I ever was before? And can I be alone in thinking that the act, like so many others passed by this government, has achieved the exact reverse of what it was intended to do? More foxes, more deer and more hares are dying now than ever before and in ways that are very much more cruel.

Even that most emotive of hunting practices - the digging out of foxes gone to ground - is still permitted under the present law. All a hunt needs is the written word of the landowner that he is rearing game there and he regards foxes as a threat.

Fox hunts, generally, have switched to laying false trails for hounds (a ruse, say the antis, to flush live foxes) or to flushing foxes towards guns or birds of prey while using only two permitted hounds. Various court cases up and down the country, with only one successful prosecution (another is pending in the West Country), have failed to resolve what is and what is not legal in the hunting field.

Hunt membership and foot-following has even increased, says the Countryside Alliance, with a 300,000 turn-out for the Boxing Day meets and with one in five hunts being invited to ride on new territories. Before the ban, hunts killed an estimated 20,000 foxes a year, perhaps a quarter of the overall kill.

In a survey of 60 of the 185 fox hunts in England and Wales by the Masters of Foxhounds Association, most reported that they were encountering fewer foxes than ever before, the clearest indication yet that, where fox hunts are failing to control foxes, farmers and gamekeepers are now doing it themselves. 'Hunts were able to manage the fox population, not decimate it,' says Alastair Jackson, the association's chairman. 'Today, a keeper will shoot a fox rather than leave it for the hunt.'

When it comes to the hare, the figures are grotesque, a slaughter on an unparalleled scale. In the last year of hare coursing - and coursers keep precise statistics because greyhounds are matched in knock-out competition - 180 hares were killed in 1,462 courses on 71 days on 10 purely coursing estates. The next year, on the same estates, 8,000 hares were shot.

On one estate, according to National Coursing Club figures, 330 hares were shot in one day. A fortnight before, when coursing was still legal, just nine hares were killed there. 'Everyone knew what the consequences of the ban would be,' I was told by Charles Blanning, the secretary of the National Coursing Club. 'We told MPs and ministers so at meetings we had prior to the bill being published. But they didn't care. They had a single-issue agenda which was to get rid of hunting and hare coursing and damn the consequences. They're really not interested in animals.'

Before the act, hares lived off the land consuming crops until they were chased, perhaps only once in their lives, by two competing greyhounds for about 20 or so seconds. Statistically, eight out of nine of them survived to resume their lives off the land around them. Farmers claim that five hares can eat as much as one sheep, so there is no longer any point in affording them grazing.

It is the same with deer hunting. In the summer before the hunting ban, there were an estimated 900 animals on the Quantocks. Now that they are being allowed to gather in greater numbers than previously, the farmers are reaching for their guns again. Last year's count was 700. A similar reduction has been noted on Exmoor, which has an estimated herd of 4,000 red deer.

The last decade in which numbers fell so dramatically was the second of the last century, especially during the First World War, when hunting stopped completely and farmers shot them for the table. The herd on the Quantocks went down to 35 and was only revived through a grant from the government that enabled local huntsmen to bring seven red deer stags by train from Sussex and then release them into the hills. Local farmers kept to a seven-year moratorium on hunting before it resumed in the mid 1920s.

'Ever since then, deer have prospered,' says Nick Bucknall, a retired farmer whose grandfather, Lt Col Sir Dennis Boles MP, managed to persuade the Lloyd George government to come up with the grant. 'Ninety nine per cent of farmers support the hunt and like to see deer on their land, but not the damage done to their crops. One of the results of hunting with a full pack of hounds was that it kept the herds dispersed. Now we're only allowed to use two to flush to guns, more are gathering in greater numbers on farmers' lands. They're being shot again.

'A good stag can net someone £400-plus. A royal stag with 12 points on its antlers is worth £1,200. If farmer A hears that farmer B has done that, he's inclined to think the next time a big stag comes on to my land I'll get him. Why should I let him damage my crops?'

Guy Everard, a farmer, chairman of Endangered Exmoor and a rider with the Tiverton Stag Hounds, echoes that sentiment. 'I tolerate the deer eating my spring grass my sheep should eat,' he says, 'but I tolerate them because of hunting. Take that away and I won't.'

The shooting debate is now becoming much more central to what is happening to foxes. The main anti-hunting lobby, including the League Against Cruel Sports, has a rather naive and touching faith in gunshot killing instantly. Landowners and shooters disagree, saying that foxes can sometimes be very difficult to kill outright and die lingering, gangrenous deaths underground.

God knows what set of statistics is needed before someone attempts to repeal this appalling act. It has caused the value of foxes, deer and hare to become debased, their status and worth so reduced that deer and hare are now nothing but meat and the fox mere vermin.

Most civilised urban and suburban people probably supported the ban on hunting because in some way they felt it would benefit wild mammals. It is a very difficult concept for them to grasp that the very opposite is true. Perhaps to understand fully the conundrum, we need to anthropomorphise more, not less. For if I were a fox or a deer, I'd be begging for a return to 2004. And if I were a hare, I'd be down on my knees praying for the good old days of coursing where, for 20 seconds of supposed terror, everything was a free lunch.

· John Dodd lives in the Hampshire countryside. He does not hunt, shoot or fish and has nothing to do with any countryside organisation.